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The Ostrich Communal Nesting System
As the study of cooperative breeding systems expands, a number of key species form the examples that underpin our general understanding. The ostrich is increasingly becoming such a textbook species, on the basis of the results obtained in Brian Bertram's study of vigilance and egg discrimination in this extraordinary bird. Here Bertram presents new data on the ostrich communal nesting system, in which several females lay in one female's nest, with only one female and the male doing all the work. The Ostrich Communal Nesting System unravels the basis of the cooperation observed, and explains how a system involving apparent altruism is maintained by natural selection. It is now possible as never before to explain and quantify the effects of the different choices these birds make and to integrate ecological and morphological factors such as predation and size. Based on three seasons of study in Tsavo West National Park in Kenya, this book depended on recognizing individual birds, detecting and monitoring well-concealed nests, determining motherhood of eggs from their surface appearance, and time-lapse photography of nests. Key findings were that females could switch rapidly between reproductive strategies, that a nesting female could recognize her own eggs and when necessary discriminate against those of other females, and that the whiteness of ostrich eggs is an adaptation that protects them against overheating but at the cost of greater vulnerability to predation.
Originally published in 1992.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Originally published in 1992.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
196 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1992
6 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 2, 2024
With *The Ostrich Communal Nesting System*, I feel like my rediscovery of the animal kingdom has peaked. I've found a book that had me excited to read and had me engaged on an intellectual level like no other "zoology" (at least, animal-based) nonfiction title had yet, including even Brian C. R. Bertram's *A Pride of Lions*, the book which encouraged me to seek a bit more of his work out. It's based on science and has a helluva lot of graphs and charts, but also ties together all that observational data with Bertram's musings on bird evolution and why the ostriches turned out appearing as community-focused as their incubation behavior seems to betrays them to be. I did have a really good time with this book, but I'm not sure how to translate that into a review; I suppose I'll go over the content of the book and try to explain why it seemed to speak to me despite my lack of academic zoological experience or education.
First, Bertram introduces us to the ostrich - this means a crash course on their physicality; the then-four subspecies (Masai, North African, South African, and one now recognized as its own species, the Somali); the rather open habitats they like; and some info on their relationship with mankind because, apparently, there's a rather booming ostrich farming industry I never knew about. Bertram then outlines this study, where he spent three African dry seasons from 1977 to 1979 (think July to September/October) investigating reports of female ostriches laying their eggs in other females' nests, which runs counter to our typical understanding of how birds work. The "Methods" chapter is important for specifying some nitty gritty details, like the study area (170 sq. km. in the Tsavo West National Park), how individual birds were recognized by the observers, and how birds/nests were watched. "Population" contains a lot of info about the makeup of the study area's Masai ostrich population, from tracking age ratios per year to the sex divide - there seemed to be about 1.25 females for every male, which didn't seem like enough, so Bertram explains that a pro-male bias is probably in play because their plumage is easier to see and, as outlined in another graph, they were more commonly observed at closer distances, and since more birds are found at short distances for common sense reasons... you get the gist.
My goal of this review was not to nitty-gritty the whole study out, so let's just talk about the brunt of the book: the communal nesting system, a biological system where females ostriches are split between major and minor hens, depending on if they have a nest of their own to incubate on or not, respectively. Major hens mate with a certain (although not always consistent on a yearly basis) male each dry season and end up laying on and sitting on a nest he scratches out before their official pairing, trading off incubation duties to the male every night, as shown by some graphs which start pretty scarce but eventually flesh out into "U" shapes over the course of a nest's lifespan. Minor hens, on the other hand, roam around and mate with various males and lay in various nests. This actually ends up giving the male a greater genetic stake in his own nest than the female due to the ratio of whose genes are in which eggs, even though it's considered that the female ostrich has some way of telling her eggs apart from other females' because before incubation, she consistently pushes out the outsiders' eggs in favor of her own because she can only lay on twenty-or-so. Major hens can become minor hens if their nests are destroyed, and there have been cases of minor hens turning into major ones, but a hen only cross-pollinated duties once (a major hen went all minor hen for a moment) for seemingly no good reason. There's actually a cool chart which displays the overall procreation success rate for hens of different strategies, and the major hens ended up the most consistent and efficient, with one of three flip-floppers between major and minor strategies also carrying significant genes forward. The book-length study does close with musing on why ostriches evolved this way (possibly for dilution of a major hen's brood for when predators attack or for giving minor females the chance to lay in many places so they're not all wiped out by predators), which ties into the high predation rates by jackals, hyenas, and Egyptian vultures covered earlier in the text.
This whole text seemed rather nerdy to me as someone whose livelihood or grade never involved reading from scientific papers, but I really enjoyed it. The wealth of graphs/charts in here really helped me understand the different concepts and connect them to each other, and what was being said in the body of the text always referenced seamlessly. It enhanced my understanding of things and even completely introduced me to a lot of concepts and made me consider things I never would have before, like the whole "bias" that came from being more easily able to spot male birds than females. It's pretty common-sense once you think about it, but I wouldn't have thought about it before this. And I was engaging with it on an intellectual level too; when Bertram was talking about how some eggs were dyed a darker color and put out to see if having a duller egg than the usual shiny, white ones would decrease predation. Unsurprisingly, it did, but I wondered: maybe they evolved to be shiny and white and reflective so the eggs don't heat up too much, even if it does increase predation? And then Bertram addressed that thought and confirmed my musings being right. I'm not trying to brag about that thought (although I always appreciate being right), but want to point out that my mind was working at a certain level because the text encouraged me to think that way in real-time when reading, which is probably just about all you can ask for.
At the end of the day, I really don't have bad things to say about this book; it's pretty dang good, and made things easy to understand for this novice without, as far as a can tell, dumbing anything down. Props to Bertram for being able to do that, and for ensuring that I'll find more books like this - despite their expensiveness, even for other installments in Princeton's "Monographs in Ecology and Behavior" series - and some open access studies online to think my teeth into. I'm giving this an 8.5/10 (not any higher because, well, I want to leave room for even better zoological books so they don't simply hit their head on the ceiling), and am hoping that this silly little review on an oft-read book helps somebody, in some way, even if it's just my future self. And if it's you instead - well, even better.
First, Bertram introduces us to the ostrich - this means a crash course on their physicality; the then-four subspecies (Masai, North African, South African, and one now recognized as its own species, the Somali); the rather open habitats they like; and some info on their relationship with mankind because, apparently, there's a rather booming ostrich farming industry I never knew about. Bertram then outlines this study, where he spent three African dry seasons from 1977 to 1979 (think July to September/October) investigating reports of female ostriches laying their eggs in other females' nests, which runs counter to our typical understanding of how birds work. The "Methods" chapter is important for specifying some nitty gritty details, like the study area (170 sq. km. in the Tsavo West National Park), how individual birds were recognized by the observers, and how birds/nests were watched. "Population" contains a lot of info about the makeup of the study area's Masai ostrich population, from tracking age ratios per year to the sex divide - there seemed to be about 1.25 females for every male, which didn't seem like enough, so Bertram explains that a pro-male bias is probably in play because their plumage is easier to see and, as outlined in another graph, they were more commonly observed at closer distances, and since more birds are found at short distances for common sense reasons... you get the gist.
My goal of this review was not to nitty-gritty the whole study out, so let's just talk about the brunt of the book: the communal nesting system, a biological system where females ostriches are split between major and minor hens, depending on if they have a nest of their own to incubate on or not, respectively. Major hens mate with a certain (although not always consistent on a yearly basis) male each dry season and end up laying on and sitting on a nest he scratches out before their official pairing, trading off incubation duties to the male every night, as shown by some graphs which start pretty scarce but eventually flesh out into "U" shapes over the course of a nest's lifespan. Minor hens, on the other hand, roam around and mate with various males and lay in various nests. This actually ends up giving the male a greater genetic stake in his own nest than the female due to the ratio of whose genes are in which eggs, even though it's considered that the female ostrich has some way of telling her eggs apart from other females' because before incubation, she consistently pushes out the outsiders' eggs in favor of her own because she can only lay on twenty-or-so. Major hens can become minor hens if their nests are destroyed, and there have been cases of minor hens turning into major ones, but a hen only cross-pollinated duties once (a major hen went all minor hen for a moment) for seemingly no good reason. There's actually a cool chart which displays the overall procreation success rate for hens of different strategies, and the major hens ended up the most consistent and efficient, with one of three flip-floppers between major and minor strategies also carrying significant genes forward. The book-length study does close with musing on why ostriches evolved this way (possibly for dilution of a major hen's brood for when predators attack or for giving minor females the chance to lay in many places so they're not all wiped out by predators), which ties into the high predation rates by jackals, hyenas, and Egyptian vultures covered earlier in the text.
This whole text seemed rather nerdy to me as someone whose livelihood or grade never involved reading from scientific papers, but I really enjoyed it. The wealth of graphs/charts in here really helped me understand the different concepts and connect them to each other, and what was being said in the body of the text always referenced seamlessly. It enhanced my understanding of things and even completely introduced me to a lot of concepts and made me consider things I never would have before, like the whole "bias" that came from being more easily able to spot male birds than females. It's pretty common-sense once you think about it, but I wouldn't have thought about it before this. And I was engaging with it on an intellectual level too; when Bertram was talking about how some eggs were dyed a darker color and put out to see if having a duller egg than the usual shiny, white ones would decrease predation. Unsurprisingly, it did, but I wondered: maybe they evolved to be shiny and white and reflective so the eggs don't heat up too much, even if it does increase predation? And then Bertram addressed that thought and confirmed my musings being right. I'm not trying to brag about that thought (although I always appreciate being right), but want to point out that my mind was working at a certain level because the text encouraged me to think that way in real-time when reading, which is probably just about all you can ask for.
At the end of the day, I really don't have bad things to say about this book; it's pretty dang good, and made things easy to understand for this novice without, as far as a can tell, dumbing anything down. Props to Bertram for being able to do that, and for ensuring that I'll find more books like this - despite their expensiveness, even for other installments in Princeton's "Monographs in Ecology and Behavior" series - and some open access studies online to think my teeth into. I'm giving this an 8.5/10 (not any higher because, well, I want to leave room for even better zoological books so they don't simply hit their head on the ceiling), and am hoping that this silly little review on an oft-read book helps somebody, in some way, even if it's just my future self. And if it's you instead - well, even better.
December 26, 2017
I used this book to inform research for a wildlife documentary and it's great. What Bertram doesn't know about ostriches clearly isn't worth knowing.
October 10, 2021
I owe this man my Bird World class grade
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews